...by me, but not here; it's at The Ancillary Review of Books, and you can read it here:
Attempts
A reality-based blog by Stephen Saperstein Frug
"There is naught that you can do, other than to resist, with hope or without it. But you do not stand alone."
Wednesday, January 20, 2021
Poem of the Day: When people say, “we have made it through worse before”
When people say, “we have made it through worse before”
all I hear is the wind slapping against the gravestones
of those who did not make it, those who did not
survive to see the confetti fall from the sky, those who
did not live to watch the parade roll down the street.
I have grown accustomed to a lifetime of aphorisms
meant to assuage my fears, pithy sayings meant to
convey that everything ends up fine in the end. There is no
solace in rearranging language to make a different word
tell the same lie. Sometimes the moral arc of the universe
does not bend in a direction that will comfort us.
Sometimes it bends in ways we don’t expect & there are
people who fall off in the process. Please, dear reader,
do not say I am hopeless, I believe there is a better future
to fight for, I simply accept the possibility that I may not
live to see it. I have grown weary of telling myself lies
that I might one day begin to believe. We are not all left
standing after the war has ended. Some of us have
become ghosts by the time the dust has settled.
America! America outraged! America broken! America martyred! But America liberated!
A sneak preview of Biden's inaugural address in just over an hour:
Thursday, January 14, 2021
Piranesi: a Spoiler-Free Review
I just finished reading Susana Clarke's second novel, Piranesi (2020) and it is just as wonderful as her first novel, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell (2004) while being so utterly unlike it that you would never guess that they were by the same author. Their only commonality is that both are distinctly British fantasy novels. Basically, if you like good fantasy novels, pick it up & read it.
That's the long and the short of it, except that I should add that I think it's a particularly good book to go into blind. After I finished reading it, I glanced at a few reviews, and I was very glad I hadn't done so first. Of course, for many of you, "by the author of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell" is sale enough. The rest of you should go read Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.—Ok, I kid: I know that that latter book was not for everyone, although for a large number of people it was utterly superb. But I will say that if you generally like fantasy but were put off by Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, then probably the parts that put you off are absent from Piranesi.
Beyond that? Try to learn nothing. The first page or two of Piranesi can be confusing, but the immediate mysteries are cleared up within another few pages. You'll be quite comfortable with them before the new mysteries, the ones you don't want spoiled, start piling up.
There's more to say about this book — a lot more — but for now, that's where I'll stop. It's great, go read it, avoid reviews.
Thursday, December 03, 2020
The Inscription Over a Modern Gate to Hell
Philip Terry is a writer who works in the oulipian tradition. He is the author of a novel, The Book of Bachelors (1995) (which was published in its entirety in an issue of The Review of Contemporary Fiction), which consists of nine chapters, each a lipogram on a different letter of the alphabet. He wrote a book of versions of Shakespeare's Sonnets, each modified by a different oulipian constraint (the results are predictably mixed). And he did a... you can't really call it a translation... adaptation of Dante's Inferno.
For comparison, here are the opening five stanzas of Alan Mandlebaum's translation of the Inferno, Canto III:
THROUGH ME THE WAY INTO THE SUFFERING CITY,
THROUGH ME THE WAY TO THE ETERNAL PAIN,
THROUGH ME THE WAY THAT RUNS AMONG THE LOST.JUSTICE URGED ON MY HIGH ARTIFICER;
MY MAKER WAS DIVINE AUTHORITY,
THE HIGHEST WISDOM, AND THE PRIMAL LOVE.BEFORE ME NOTHING BUT ETERNAL THINGS
WERE MADE, AND I ENDURE ETERNALLY.
ABANDON EVERY HOPE, WHO ENTER HERE.These words—their aspect was obscure—I read
inscribed above a gateway, and I said:
“Master, their meaning is difficult for me.”And he to me, as one who comprehends:
“Here one must leave behind all hesitation;
here every cowardice must meet its death.
And now, here are the opening lines of Philip Terry's Canto III:
THROUGH ME THE WAY TO THE DOLEFUL CAMPUS,
THROUGH ME THE WAY TO ETERNAL DEBT,
THROUGH ME THE WAY TO THE FORSAKEN GENERATION.
FREEDOM OF THOUGHT INSPIRED MY FOUNDERS;
POLITICAL EXPEDIENCY RUINED ME,
COUPLED BY BETRAYAL OF PRINCIPLE AND PLEDGE.
BEFORE ME NOTHING BUT ETERNAL THINGS WERE MADE,
NOW I SHALL MARK YOU ETERNALLY.
ABANDON ALL HOPE, YOU WHO ENTER HERE.
I saw these words spelled out on a digital display
Above the entrance to the Knowledge Gateway.
‘Master,’ I said, ‘this is scary.’
He answered me, speaking with a drawl:
‘Now you need to grit your teeth,
This isn’t the moment to shit yourself.
It's quite funny— the first nine lines are, I think, a very good joke.
But I am rather uncertain, having read (thanks to Amazon's "see inside" feature) the opening two and a half cantos, whether it's a joke that can be sustained over an entire book. So I am hesitant to plunk down $16 to get a copy.
Anyone know if the whole thing works at all?
Thursday, November 26, 2020
The Same Thanksgiving Post I Have Put Up Every Year Since 1621
Serve the LORD with gladness: come before his presence with singing.... Enter into his gates with thanksgiving, and into his courts with praise: be thankful unto him, and bless his name.
-- Psalm 100: 2, 4
ANYA: I love a ritual sacrifice.
BUFFY: It's not really a one of those.
ANYA: To commemorate a past event, you kill and eat an animal. It's a ritual sacrifice. With pie.
-- Buffy the Vampire Slayer, "Pangs" by Jane Espenson
The title of this post is false, of course: after an unbroken streak from 1621-2013, I have not posted it in seven years. But a friend of mine said he looked forward to it, so, in honor of the day, I am resuming, at least for this year, the ritual. There are so many rituals we will lack this year; this is one I can reclaim.
If you are reading this, I am thankful that you have (to borrow from another tradition) been granted life, been sustained, and been enabled to reach this occasion. Too few of us have. I hope you are being safe today; for even fewer will have by next year, or even by New Year's.
The Buffy the Vampire Slayer quote above comes from the Thanksgiving episode Pangs; you can watch the clip of it here:
And another, bonus quote from the same episode is here:
It's a fun episode; but for those of you reading this who aren't familiar with the show (hi Jon), not really the best place to start. Hit me up if you want more advice along these lines.
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.
Tuesday, September 15, 2020
A Longer-Term Problem
Sunday, March 08, 2020
A Pesitlence Isn't a Thing Made to Man's Measure
"Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky. There have been as many plagues as wars in history; yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise.… When a war breaks out, people say: 'It's too stupid; it can't last long.' But though a war may well be 'too stupid', that doesn't prevent its lasting.…
"In this respect our townfolk were like everybody else, wrapped up in themselves; in other words they were humanists; they disbelieved in pestilences. A pestilence isn't a thing made to man's measure; therefore we tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogy of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away. But it doesn't always pass away and, from one dream to another, ti is men who pass away...
"They went on doing business, arranged for journeys, and formed views. How should they have given a thought to anything like plague, which rules out any future, cancels journeys, silences the exchange of views. They fancied themselves free, and no one will ever be free, so long as there are pestilences."
— Albert Camus, The Plague
Tuesday, September 24, 2019
TWO IMPORTANT LANGUAGE NOTES
2) The word ducking is now an intensifier, as in "I can't ducking believe Pelosi actually had the guts to start impeachment hearings", and "I hope that the GOP is willing to do its ducking job and convict". Easier on kids & Apple ducking lets you type it.
Signed,
The English Language Academy
Saturday, June 22, 2019
Happenstance: the Print Edition
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/happenstanceprint/happenstance-the-print-edition
Go have a look!
Wednesday, June 05, 2019
"But What Can I Do?"
My reply:
"As individuals"? No. Nothing we can do as individuals is remotely equal to the scale of the problem. I mean, sure, drive less, fly never, get solar panels — all good things. But if everyone who cared did this it won't help. Only a radical restructuring of society and the economy can save us.
So what can we do? What we need to do is to elect politicians committed to a restructuring of the economy and society to a degree consonant with the problem. Not just Democrats; AOC Democrats, not Biden Democrats. (Along those lines: go to marches. Sign petitions. Give money. Make sure Jay Inslee is in the debates, at least.)
How do we do this? The only thing I know of, broadly, is to change the way people think. The best thing to do, I suppose, would be to find conservatives you know and convert them. That's tough, though. Second best? Try to convince liberals you know to treat the problem with the seriousness that is its due.
That's why I post on it all the time. If enough of us get that this is an emergency, one that will need to be solved by greater-than-WW2 style mobilization starting yesterday, then maybe, *maybe*, we can overcome this.
So talk about it, as often as you can stand or more. Be that annoying person who always points out that the house is on fire. And get everyone you know to talk about it.
If enough of us talk, if enough of us listen, then we won't be individuals any more, but a collective. And then maybe we can do something that can help.
Thursday, May 02, 2019
HAPPENSTANCE, pages 402-403
Today's pages, however, are highly unusual: an attempt to (in Abel & Madden's marvelous phrase) draw words without the usual addition of written pictures. It's part of a sequence that is interspersed throughout chapter 11, in which one of the characters sits with another in the hospital. Intercutting between that and a conversation, I use different techniques to try to capture this experience. Most of those techniques are visual. This is linguistic — or, rather, linguistic-as-visual. It's an old technique, of course: the first of the page owes much to the work of William Gaddis and similar writers; the one on the left is an example of concrete poetry, which is a whole form with its own traditions, etc.
But the result of this is that I am using more words in smaller fonts than elsewhere in the book. And the way the site that hosts the work works, I have to use smaller file sizes than the book was created in... and thus the words aren't always easy to read. So I am reposting these pages here, full-size:
Click through to see it more clearly!
And if you haven't read Happenstance before, I hope you will check it out. Just go here and click through!
(And don't overlook the helpful little "save my place" button on the bottom of each page!)